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Kansas’ renewable portfolio standard is being challenged in the state legislature again this year.

It’s the fourth consecutive year that renewable-energy opponents such as Wichita-based Koch Industries and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce have attempted to downsize or eliminate the requirement that investor-owned utilities derive increasing proportions of their energy from renewable sources.

A 2009 law requires the state’s major utilities to obtain a steadily increasing proportion of their power from renewable sources. The law applies to 10 percent of power sold this year, 15 percent in the years 2016 through 2019, and 20 percent annually starting in 2020.

Kansas’ major utilities would actually likely meet the current standard, even if it were repealed, according to clean-energy advocates. They either already have met the 20 percent standard, or have committed to investments that will meet that standard by 2020.

“Practically, the utilities are not going to draw back on their clean energy” because of the bill, said Zack Pistora, who lobbies the Kansas Legislature on behalf of the Sierra Club. “They are not going to all of a sudden cancel their investments in power-purchase agreements, because that’s been economical for them.

“The key element here is that it’s removing our signal to Kansas, to the country and to businesses that Kansas values clean energy,” Pistora continued. “By us having that goal in statute, Kansas is saying, ‘We are open for business when it comes to clean energy. We want you to come to Kansas to invest.’ ”

Dorothy Barnett, executive director of Kansas’ Climate + Energy Project, said that the renewable energy standard already has helped Kansas meet the developing terms of the federal Clean Power Plan, and would continue to do so.

When it established carbon-reduction goals for each of the states, the Environmental Protection Agency settled on a relatively modest 20 percent for Kansas. And that goal, according to Barnett, is a direct result of the state’s renewable portfolio standard, and the substantial wind industry that has developed in recent years.

To meet the goal of the Clean Power Plan, Kansas and other states will have to prove to the federal government that they have the policy infrastructure to make further reductions.

“The language in the proposed EPA plan is ‘enforceable,’” Barnett said. “You have to have an enforceable rule.”

A renewable energy standard is such a rule, she said. An efficiency standard is another. Twenty-four states have “fully funded” efficiency requirements, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Kansas is not one of them.

“If we want to use (renewable energy) to get to the target, we can’t take that law away,” Barnett said. In fact, she said, meeting the Clean Energy Plan could entail increasing the renewable standard.

The EPA plan lists four strategies for decreasing carbon dioxide emissions: greater energy efficiency, more renewable energy, greater efficiency among fossil-fuel power plants and a shift to plants that are less carbon-intensive.

“The renewable portfolio standard is a key accountability tool in moving forward with the Clean Power Plan,” Pistora said. “If we want to increase renewables in order to decrease carbon emissions, we’re going to need something like the RPS – a performance benchmarking system – to allow us to say we’re increasing our renewable energy, and we’re going to keep increasing it.”

Barnett contends that a renewable standard serves the state in other ways.

“Companies are looking to locate in states where they can buy clean energy,” she said. “The RPS is one of the few signals we have. Taking that out of the toolbox is ridiculous.”

She characterizes the persistent annual drive to kill the Kansas standard not as a result of popular sentiment, but instead “a think-tank kind of push,” driven by Americans for Prosperity, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Policy Institute and the Koch brothers.

Barnett said she believes that, behind the drive to eliminate the renewable-energy standard is “a market-share issue. When wind was a small resource, it wasn’t an issue. As the renewable field gets a foothold, this becomes a ploy to protect the fossil fuel industry.”

She claims that the efforts to get rid of the renewables standard don’t reflect the views of most Kansans. The Climate + Energy Project partnered with Republican-affiliated North Star Opinion Research to conduct a survey in Kansas about a year ago and found that:

• 91 percent of Kansans strongly support renewable energy
• 73 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats endorse the renewable portfolio standard
• Two-thirds of respondents favor a more aggressive renewable energy standard, and would pay another $1 to $2 per month to carry it out.

“It’s what Kansans want,” she said.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated Dorothy Barnett’s title.

When wind-farm developers look for a promising site for new turbines, they usually bypass windblown South Dakota in favor of North Dakota, Minnesota or Iowa.

The tax burden in South Dakota, it turns out, makes the neighboring states look like bargains.

Adam Sokolski, the manager of regional market structure and policy for wind farm developer Iberdrola Renewables, has done the math. He concluded that the state taxes on a 100 MW wind farm operating for 20 years would amount to $8.9 million in North Dakota, $9.6 million in Minnesota and $13.9 million in South Dakota.

He called South Dakota’s tax burden nothing short of punitive.

Chris Kunkle, a regional policy manager for Wind on the Wires, an organization that lays the technical and policy groundwork for more wind energy, concurred on that point.

“From what I hear,” he said, “the tax climate is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem in South Dakota now.” →

That’s a question that wind power skeptics or critics frequently ask. While coal, nuclear and gas plants theoretically run uninterrupted whenever they are called upon, humans have no control over when wind turbines stop and start spinning. Some utility and power company officials say this is a reason that “reliable,” baseload power should be valued more than wind.

But in a report released Thursday and an accompanying webinar, experts with the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) explained how wind can actually be seen as a more reliable source than conventional power plants — one that contributes to rather than inhibits the stability of the grid as a whole. →

Correction: This story has been updated to say that two wind farm projects in Gratiot County are separately owned by Invenergy and DTE.

Officials in Michigan’s “wind capital” in the eastern Lower Peninsula are struggling to tighten planning rules and are considering halting further wind development to stop an industry that critics say has faced lax regulation there.

It’s also another example of how wind energy’s growth has divided residents when economic and clean-energy benefits meet zoning and noise complaints, though wind supporters say those complaints come from a vocal few.

But even some supporters of wind energy question whether Huron County — the hub of Michigan’s wind development with over 300 turbines in the state’s Thumb region — has reached its saturation point for wind turbines.

“The ordinances we’re currently operating under are inadequate to protect the jewel of Huron County — its shoreline,” said John Nugent, chairman of the Huron County Board of Commissioners. “It’s because the county is becoming saturated.” →

Yet the nuclear industry, which generates almost a fifth of the nation’s energy, has declared war not on gas but on wind and solar, which represent about 4 and 0.2 percent of our energy mix, respectively.

Nuclear generators have successfully fought against renewable and energy efficiency standards on the state level, and lobbied against tax incentives for wind and solar on the federal level. They’re in the process of securing changes in regional capacity markets that would benefit nuclear and harm solar and wind.

While Ohio lawmakers have largely put the brakes on the state’s clean energy policy, cities and counties are moving forward with their own initiatives.

Electricity aggregation has been a favorite cause of active groups and communities in the Buckeye State, grouping residents and small commercial customers together to purchase electricity, allowing for the leveraging of buying power to obtain lower generation rates.

Ohio enacted legislation allowing municipalities to aggregate in 2001. Since then, over 286 municipalities statewide have chosen electrical aggregation, according to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Major cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati offer 100 percent renewable electricity packages as a way to shrink their carbon footprints and power costs all at once. →

In a small community on the southern coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a 28 MW wind farm remains a focus of dispute among landowners, some of whom are bringing the developer into yet another lawsuit over claims about noise.

Traverse City-based Heritage Sustainable Energy’s wind project in Garden Township, along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is the subject of a lawsuit filed this month in federal court in Marquette. It’s the second suit against the company in a year. Heritage settled a case out of court over six months ago when residents near its Stoney Corners Wind Farm in the Lower Peninsula alleged it was causing health problems.

The 14-turbine Garden Wind Farm, located west of Escanaba, became operational in September 2012 and was the first wind project in the U.P.

A company official, who claimed he first heard of the lawsuit when contacted by the Associated Press last week, said Heritage has been working with local residents over noise concerns. In an interview, he disputed claims made in the lawsuit over the project’s threat to migratory and endangered bird species, based on studies to be released in the coming months. He said that the company had not been served with any legal documents pertaining to the suit as of Thursday night. →

In March, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder plans to make a major statewide energy policy announcement. While he has not publicly disclosed details of his plan, some lawmakers and clean-energy advocates are concerned about the Republican governor’s over-commitment to natural gas as aging coal plants close.

Snyder spent roughly one minute during his 49-minute State of the State speech Tuesday night talking about the “need for a long-term policy.”

“It needs to be an adaptable policy because of the lack of federal policy and the challenges of a global marketplace. It needs to focus on important things such as eliminating energy waste and the conversion of coal to natural gas — an asset of the state of Michigan — and renewables.”

Snyder reportedly said at a conference last week that Michigan is “well positioned to actually have a fair amount of that coal demand go to natural gas.” He said his plan is based on three pillars of “affordability, reliability and environmental protection.” →

A drop in investments in Ohio’s clean energy industry could cost the state jobs, say industry experts. Matters could be made worse by continuing uncertainty about the future of Ohio’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.

Last week the Pew Charitable Trusts released a report documenting the huge growth in investments in Ohio’s clean energy industry in the years following adoption of those standards in 2008.

That same report also shows a huge drop after state lawmakers began debating changes to those standards in 2013. The study’s authors expect investment levels will stay low through at least 2017. →

Minnesota would see more than $6.2 billion in capital investments if the state raised its renewable energy standard (RES) to 40 percent by 2030, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Meanwhile, the change would have a minimal impact on ratepayers, the UCS says.

Currently the state’s policy calls for 25 percent of energy to come from renewable sources by 2025. With Minnesota receiving 19 percent of its energy from renewable sources today, the prospect of increasing the goal to 40 percent has gotten the attention of policy groups and lawmakers. →